Friday, July 22, 2016

Interpreting "Make America Great Again" As Racist: How The Left Descended Into An Intellectual Cesspool Of Bad Literary Criticism

"Make America Great Again"
Right.
So this presupposes:
(1) America was great at some point in the past
(2) America is not great now
It's also an exhortation, specifically:
(A) Make America great!
And there is a suggestion that:
(3) The way in which we are being exhorted to make America great is the way in which America used to be great. That is, though MAGA doesn't explicitly say that we should go back to being great in the way that we used to be great, that seems to be the suggestion.

It's a kind of article of faith in many parts of the left that this is racist.
Why?
Well, here's where the left's descent into crapitude comes in. The lefter you go, the more popular methods of reasoning adopted from shitty literary criticism become. One of the most popular methods is:

(M) Pick the most bigoted explanation/interpretation you can think of for anything anyone right of the left says; assert the explanation/interpretation as if it were incontrovertible fact.

So here's what they do: they think about all the features America used to have, they note the obvious fact that one feature America used to have is that it was more racist than it now is, and they leap to the hypothesis that whoever says MAGA is saying it because they long for a more racist America. Do they really believe it's the right explanation? Or are they just making a rhetorical move in a tactical, political game? To make that distinction is to misunderstand the contemporary left. To think there's a distinction between seeking truth and seeking rhetorical victory is to be a retrograde, Western, phallogocentric Neanderthal.
Anyway...see?
Easy peasy.
There's the little problem that many people who pull this move also claim that American is not less racist than it used to be... But consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...*
Why not explain MAGA at least partially in terms of a generalized nostalgia of a kind shared by all sorts of people in all sorts of political parties all around the world? Or as a dopey, hollow, thinly-veiled way of saying "Obama sucks"? Well...again, to ask such questions is to fundamentally misunderstand the postpostmodern left.
Oh also: because all conservatives are racist, dummy.
Why do I have to keep explaining this stuff to you?

I'm sort of shooting from the hip here, as usual of late. Don't take that for more than what it is.

In case there should be any doubt about it: I hate Trump. Dude would be beneath my contempt if my contempt did not go so very, very far down into the vasty deep.